The present invention generally relates to digitally represented graphics and more particularly to improving the performance of generating digitally represented graphics.
Digitally represented graphics, such as computer graphics, is continuously improving in performance.
In the 1980's and 1990's, display adapters for computers and game consoles appeared with graphics accelerators, offloading the Central Processing Unit (CPU) in graphics generation. Initially, the display adapters offered acceleration of 2D graphics, but eventually these also included support for accelerated 3D graphics. Modern display adapters use a processing unit often named a graphics processing unit (GPU).
Due to the complexity of 3D graphics, GPU:s of today use a significant amount of their processing power to perform calculations related to 3D graphics.
A continuous problem with display adapters is performance. There are always new applications and games requiring higher frame rates (rendered screen images per second), higher resolutions and higher image quality, resulting in requirements that each screen image should be rendered in a short a time as possible. In other words, it is always important to increase performance.
Consequently, there is still a problem with insufficient abilities to improve performance in digitally represented graphics.